Industry 4.0: People at the core of the revolution

The Industry 4.0 Observatory, now in its fifth year, was founded with the objective of analyzing and understanding the key digital innovations that are transforming the industrial and manufacturing sector. The aim is to make knowledge of the topic available, share best practices and create an active Italian community, open to exchanging views. The digital transformation is in fact proving to be the key factor in the current evolution/revolution, gradually changing usage, customs, ways of doing and saying things, and of course ways of producing and selling. And people are at the core of this transformation. In this Research edition we used numerous sources to trace a complete picture of Industry 4.0 implementations, both nationally and internationally. Using direct and indirect (analysed by gathering information from secondary sources) case studies, we were able to expand the sample to over 800 4.0 applications, understood as the implementation of a specific Smart Technology in a specific process. We also estimated the value of the Industry 4.0 market in Italy in 2018, providing comparable data from previous years.